7 College Activists Fighting Food and Housing Insecurity on Campus

While some students might be dreaming of homemade pumpkin pie, turkey, and mashed potatoes this Thanksgiving break, others might be wondering where their next meal is coming from. On one of our country’s most food-centric holidays, it’s important to recognize that not everyone has the opportunity to share in the bounty. In fact, recent research has shown a third of all college students have experienced food and housing insecurity.

Taken together, housing and food insecurity are often referred to as basic needs insecurity. If someone is unable to buy enough food to eat or unsure or where their next meal might come from, they are food insecure. Housing insecurity covers a range of unstable living situations, from homelessness to an inability to pay rent and utilities.

Basic needs insecurity among students is often a hidden phenomenon. Many students and administrators are still surprised when they learn about its prevalence on their own campuses. Hunger and housing insecurity are not experiences that many students are eager to disclose to their friends or professors. For some students, housing insecurity might look like couchsurfing. Others might live in their cars. Food expenses are also one of the first things that students cut back on when money is tight. According to a study from California State University, students who reported food insecurity or homelessness also experienced negative physical and mental health that was associated with lower academic performance.

Researchers at Temple University found in a comprehensive national survey published in April 2018 that 36 percent of undergraduate students had experienced food insecurity in the previous 30 days, and an additional 36 percent had experienced housing insecurity in the past year. Nine percent of college students had reported being homeless in the previous year. The statistics are even more stark for community college students, first-generation students, students of color, and students who identify as LGBTQ+. Other populations especially likely to experience basic needs insecurity are students who are also parents and formerly incarcerated individuals.

In the last several years, colleges and universities have paid increasing attention to basic needs insecurity, although much more work needs to be done. Solutions range from campus food pantries and emergency funds to meal swipe donations and comprehensive basic needs centers that connect students to available resources. We talked to seven students who are at the forefront of tackling basic needs insecurities on their campuses. Many are driven by their own firsthand experiences with hunger and housing insecurity.

An Garagiola-Bernier, Hamline University

After she transferred to Hamline University, a private liberal arts institution in St. Paul, Minnesota, An Garagiola-Bernier (second from right) didn’t expect to see her classmates dealing with hunger. “I thought: ‘Hamline students are privileged, they don’t even know about these struggles.’ But it turns out the demographics of students who are experiencing food insecurity mirror those at my community college,” An tells Teen Vogue.

Drawing on her experience working at a basic needs resource center at Century College, she co-founded Feed Your Brain, a student-led coalition dedicated to food justice on the Hamline campus. The group operates a pop-up food pantry once a month that provides 1,500 pounds of food to around 200 students. The team has also successfully lobbied the Hamline administration to secure a space to open up a permanent pantry, which An hopes will also house other resources for low-income students. “Food insecurity is the most visible symptom of student poverty. If you have a student coming and looking for food, more often than not they need other resources as well,” says An, who stresses that all of her work wouldn’t be possible without the other students in Feed Your Brain.

Tapping into those resources can be key to students staying in school, a lesson An learned from personal experience. “When I was 16, I had to stop school and work, because we were homeless and we needed rent money. So I got my GED and started working in customer service. I always had the goal to go back to school. I wanted to be the first in my family to get a degree,” she explains.

Next spring, An will achieve that dream when she graduates with a double major in sociology and women’s studies.

Lauren Schandevel, University of Michigan

Lauren Schandevel grew up in Warren, Michigan, a working class suburb of Detroit. As a first-generation college student, she always felt a little different from many of her classmates at University of Michigan (UM) in Ann Arbor. “I noticed a lot of wealth disparities between myself and my peers,” she tells Teen Vogue.

In January 2018, the UM student government published an affordability guide, which Lauren says contained “tone-deaf advice” about budgeting. In response, she started her own guide on how to survive on a limited budget, which quickly morphed into a shared Google doc, “Being Not Rich at UM.” The crowd-sourced document has grown to more than 100 pages. She says it’s not just for low-income students as there are many middle class students who don’t receive enough financial aid to cover all the bills. It’s targeted at “anyone who has ever felt marginalized on campus.”

Students at other universities have used Lauren’s guide as a template for creating their own affordability guides (she offers advice on how to do it here). “I thought I would have trouble getting people to contribute to it, but it blew up. It’s been really exciting and cool...to talk about being a low-income student on an elite campus,” Lauren says.

Since she wrote the guide, Lauren has started a student organization called Affordable Michigan, which is focused on long-term affordable housing and food security advocacy on behalf of low-income students.

Sophie Bandarkar, University of California Berkeley

Advocating for students facing housing and food insecurity comes with Sophie Bandarkar’s job title. As Student Advocate at University of California Berkeley, she is one of five elected officers in student government and also serves as the student liaison to Berkeley’s Basic Needs Security Hub.

Her sophomore year, she helped write a $55,000 grant proposal that allowed her team to pilot an emergency housing program. Two years later the program has served more than 20 Berkeley students. “We help place them in temporary housing, up to a month, or help them with rental assistance,” Sophie tells Teen Vogue. “It’s a completely student-run and student-owned fund, which has given us a lot of flexibility to support students who...are facing immediate insecurities.”

She’s currently working on developing a homeless student protocol in conjunction with the Basic Needs Security Hub and the Office of Student Affairs. She’s also behind a proposal for a basic needs referendum, which would collect a student fee to help fund a food assistance program that would be available to out-of-state students, undocumented students, and international students — populations that aren’t eligible for many state-funded programs. The fee would also cover prevention initiatives, with the goal of keeping students from becoming food and housing insecure in the first place.

“Because we're a public institution, we have a lot of students who are on the range of the socioeconomic ladder and experience basic needs insecurity in ways you just wouldn't expect,” Sophie says. “It's really important that [basic needs insecurity] is destigmatized and that solutions are taken really seriously.”

India Blunt, Milwaukee Area Technical College

India Blunt first came into contact with The FAST Fund when she was having trouble paying her rent. She now supports other students experiencing the same issues as an assistant to the fund director, Michael Rosen. The non-profit fund provides emergency financial assistance to students attending Milwaukee Area Technical College (MATC), the largest majority-minority higher education institution in Wisconsin. Housing insecurity is the single biggest problem facing students who seek assistance from FAST Fund, which also helps students with things like car repairs and tuition. During the 2017-2018 academic year, the FAST fund provided more than $37,000 in direct emergency assistance to 104 students.

The fund is an independent non-profit that relies on contributions from faculty, staff, and community members as well as fundraisers such as an annual gala. The organization also helps connect students to other community-based resources.

“There’s shame that comes with [asking for help]. When you think of homelessness, you think of people on the street, not college students. We want people to understand that [basic needs insecurity] is way more common than you would think,” says India, who is a nursing major planning to transfer to University of Wisconsin Madison next year.

Mary-Pat Hector, Spelman College

Spelman senior Mary-Pat Hector had already made history as a college sophomore when she became the youngest woman of color to run for public office in Georgia. Now, as the national youth director and Spelman chapter president of the non-profit National Action Network (NAN), she’s addressing food insecurity at Spelman head-on. Last year, NAN gave away scholarships to Spelman students, who had to create a 30-second video of what they needed the money for. “I saw a reoccuring theme of [food insecurity] in the videos. The real question was: how are we going to solve this issue?” Mary-Pat tells Teen Vogue.

She knew that other college campuses had a program called Swipe Out Hunger, which allows students to donate unused meal swipes from their campus meal plans. When the campus administration didn’t initially respond to NAN’s request for a meeting, Mary-Pat decided to lead a hunger strike, which lasted six days. The hunger strike caught the attention of many, including Tamika Mallory, co-chair of the National Women’s March, and Reverend Al Sharpton, on social media.

Within a few days, Spelman president Mary Schmidt Campbell announced the college would provide up to 7,000 free meals a semester for hungry students. As she’s about to graduate in May, Mary-Pat is now focused on handing the torch to younger members of her student organization. “We want to encourage students who are freshmen and sophomores to be equally outspoken and teach them that they too can resist,” she says.

Selma Hassane, University of California Irvine

Selma Hassane, a senior at University of California Irvine (UCI), has been involved with helping to meet her peers’ basic needs since her first year of college. Her family immigrated to the United States from Algeria when she was 4 years old, an experience that stuck with her. “The whole move and my family’s own experiences with housing insecurity is something that was always in the back of my mind,” she tells Teen Vogue.

She started as a volunteer in the campus food pantry and then became part of a campaign to pass a referendum for a $3-per-semester fee to help fund the food pantry. Eighty-six percent of the students who participated in the referendum voted in favor of the fee. Since then, nearly $385,000 has been raised to fund programs at UCI’s FRESH Basic Needs Hub, where Selma is a programming manager. The FRESH Hub, which serves around 650 students a week, includes the largest food pantry in the UC system. Approximately 46 percent of UCI undergraduates and 26 percent of graduate students are food insecure.

“The trope of the hungry college student and eating ramen and cup of noodles has become normalized and that shouldn't be the case,” Selma says. “I want students to know that their not alone in facing these experiences and that there are services and resources to support them.”

Karla Ignacio, Hostos Community College

Karla Ignacio refers to her campus, Hostos Community College in the South Bronx, as a “food desert.” “You get out of the train station and all you see for miles is ...junk food,” she tells Teen Vogue. Last summer, Karla did an internship with the City University of New York (CUNY) Food Security Advocates project. The program helped students at John Jay College and Hostos Community College develop advocacy skills to help reduce food insecurity and hunger on their campuses.

Karla and her peers have worked to raise awareness about food insecurity among CUNY students. She says that many students are surprised to find out that members of their campus community experience food insecurity. In 2015, almost 15 percent of CUNY undergraduates reported they had gone hungry sometimes or often in the past year because they lacked resources to buy food. The advocates have also lobbied to get healthier and more affordable food in the cafeteria at Hostos, which is a commuter campus.

Another initiative was a hydroponic garden that allowed them to grow vegetables on vertical towers. The students mostly grow leafy greens, such as lettuce, kale, mustard greens, swiss chard, and spinach. The towers are harvested twice per semester. “It’s is a form of gardening that doesn't need soil to grow. And that's convenient because we're a small campus. We grow the vegetables in one of the offices and then...we give them away to students,” Karla says.

Karla has organized food drives and works at the Single Stop Center, which connects students to federal programs such as food stamps. “By doing outreach, I got to learn that [hunger] doesn't have a face,” Karla explains.